With One Stone
by Dark Puck
Summary: A young girl is in need of magical help, and Harry Dresden is out of town. It falls to Morgan to help her out, but the girl isn't telling him the entire truth.  TVverse, OC warning


Being the Warden responsible for all of Chicago isn't what certain people make it out to be. Yes, it has its advantages – advantages that I feel no qualms toward using – but I _work_ to earn them. Not every job, unfortunately, is a clear-cut case of black and white.

I'll never admit this to him, but Dresden's business as a wizard/private investigator actually makes my job easier. Yes, his methods are highly unorthodox and do occasionally cause problems that I have to clean up, but more often than not, he gets the job done. With only me and Amber left after the incident with the drake, we need him more than he thinks.

Which is why I was less than thrilled when he decided to go on vacation for a week.

Amber was of the opinion that the trouble Dresden tends to attract would follow him; I knew that even if it did go on vacation with him, there would surely be more than enough to take its place. As it turns out, she was more correct than I. This did not mean, unfortunately, that the week was entirely without problems.

Until Thursday, it did seem as though the world was behaving itself for once. Then a girl grabbed my arm as I was strolling down the sidewalk and asked, "Are you a Warden?"

My first instinct was to shake her off. I highly dislike being grabbed without warning. I refrained from this, but did gently disengage myself from her. She seemed to accept this as a silent reprimand, for she did not grab me again, but instead repeated her earlier question.

God alone knew how she'd picked me out – I keep my sword veiled when I'm not using it – but she looked alone and upset, so I answered honestly. "Yes."

"I need help," she said, her green eyes wide, "please."

I steeled myself for the usual inanities of young wizards, as mortals were mostly unaware of the magical world, and was therefore surprised when she elaborated, "A sorcerer turned my brother into a raven."

* * *

I'd taken the girl to a public library, both to get out of the chill (and what was she thinking, going out in that weather with just a scarf and a light jacket?) and to keep her at ease. Sorcerers were rarely good news in my line of work; on a scale of one to ten, they tended to rate closer to a drake. While on the way there, I got some more information from her – her name, she said, was Monica Opkirk, and she'd been trying to find help for several weeks now.

According to Miss Opkirk, the sorcerer had apprenticed her older brother, Corbin, for a short period of time and had been trying to get the boy to use black magic. She never gave a satisfactory answer as to why she had been present for the final confrontation between them, but the end result was a wounded sorcerer and a transfigured boy. The raven her brother had become apparently retained his wits and so remained with her as they fled their hometown. Now she was trying to find a way to reverse the spell on her brother without alerting the sorcerer to their presence.

The story itself sounded plausible enough, and Miss Opkirk had dodged my subtle queries as to her age and the location of her hometown with enough discomfort it seemed lying was not an easy thing for her, but something still bothered me. With the exception of the werecreatures, it was exceedingly difficult to change a human being to another form, especially one so small as a raven. From the way she described it, the sorcerer had transformed her brother with a quick spell and almost no build-up.

At last, I said, "I'll have to see your brother before I'll know if I can do anything. People who use black magic have a tendency to make their spells as permanent as they can; it's highly possible that breaking it might kill him."

She seemed to retreat inwards at my words, fiddling with the cross around her neck and softly saying, "...oh."

I stood up and offered her a hand, mainly to see if she was a wizard as I helped her up.

She was not.

"Where _is_ your brother?" I asked her.

"He's outside," she replied. "He follows me whenever he can, then lurks outside buildings until I come back out."

That was another thing. The boy had maintained his right mind? I considered that highly unlikely; it was common knowledge that the longer one was in an animal shape, the more like that animal one thought. True, corvids are generally considered to be among the most intelligent of animal species, but that does not change the fact that at the end of the day, they are only animals.

On the other hand, it was possible that the boy-turned-bird simply recognised Miss Opkirk as a friend and feeder, and that she was misinterpreting this as remembering her.

I escorted the girl from the library, instructing her to keep an eye on her brother. "The longer he remains in that body," I warned her, "the more like a bird he's likely to think. It might be best to keep him indoors so he doesn't fly off and you don't lose him for good."

A raven squawked angrily at me as it settled down on Miss Opkirk's shoulder. I ignored it.

"In fact," I added, "it might be best for both of you to play least-in-sight. I'll take you someplace safe." Well, relatively safe. With any luck, Dresden would have upgraded his wards.

Apart from the occasional stare of a pedestrian, we reached Dresden's without incident. I took great care in disabling his wards so that we could enter; while merely breaking them would have been faster, it was much better to have patience and thereby leave a level of defence in case of attack.

Also, it would spare me his whinging once Dresden had returned from his vacation.

Once it was safe to do so, I opened the door and escorted the girl and her corvine brother inside. "You can stay here for now," I told her, sparing Dresden's desk a disgusted glance. How did he keep anything straight in that mess?

"What on Earth—" began a man with a British accent.

Miss Opkirk and I turned to see Hrothbert of Bainbridge striding out of a wall. The ghost glared at me, and I waited for the inevitable objection to our presence. I didn't expect the girl to gasp with fear, trip over the low table behind her in backing away from him, and land on her rear end. The resultant crash drew both of our attentions to her; her face had gone pale with fear, and her brother the raven, perched on a chair, was cawing a challenge.

There was a resigned sigh from Bainbridge that I ignored. "Miss Opkirk, what—"

"Gh-ghost," she whispered, her eyes never leaving Bainbridge.

"Oh, well spotted," he commented; I ignored him again.

"He can't hurt you," I explained patiently. "He's bound."

Confusion chased the fear briefly from her face. "Bound? Then an ectomancer...?"

"No," I replied. "Hrothbert of Bainbridge is what happens when a sorcerer ignores the Laws of magic." She went white, and I wondered just what she hadn't told me about the sorcerer from her hometown. I turned my head to glare at Bainbridge, and he let out a long-suffering sigh.

"I'll be in my skull."

Miss Opkirk relaxed a little bit as the ghost walked back out, and I felt the beginnings of a headache coming on. Regardless, I gently asked her, "Your brother was not the only apprentice, was he?" Not daring to look at me, she nodded, and I sighed.

"Talk to me, Miss Opkirk. I can't help him if I don't have all the information."

She bit her lip and looked down, and the raven squawked angrily at me and flew at my head. He smacked hard into the shield I'd erected in an eye-blink and dropped; I caught him in both hands and glared at him. "That's enough out of you," I said sternly before depositing him onto his sister's lap. She apologised, but I cut her off with a wave of my hand. The incident had loaned some credence to her theory that he was very much aware in that bird body, though it still remained to be seen just how much.

"The boy wants manners," was my only comment before I indicated that she was to explain the rest of what she had not said.

As it turned out, there had been three other apprentices besides Corbin: an ectomancer, a weredingo, and a young man who the Wardens had been tracking for five years. So _that_ was where Rafael Thompson had disappeared to, though according to her Thompson hadn't been altogether happy with his master. Her brother had only been an apprentice for a few weeks before quitting; from that point on, he fought against the sorcerer and his apprentices with a single ally. From the way she described things, it was essentially a losing fight until Thompson abandoned ship; the weredingo and ectomancer were dispatched to find him, and the boy and his ally, a swordswoman, had decided to use the opportunity to strike.

The sorcerer had seen this coming and taken Miss Opkirk hostage, thinking that this would tame Corbin; it had in fact done the opposite. It was here that her story began to falter; she got to the part where her brother had been transformed, but she could not explain how the two of them had escaped. "Th-there was a bright flash of light," she told me, twisting one end of her frayed scarf, "and I just _knew_ that I had to run. So I grabbed Corbin and did."

I could see Bainbridge from the corner of my eye – he was remaining out of sight; the ex-sorcerer was no fool – and rose to my feet. "Thank you for coming clean with me, Miss Opkirk," I said mildly. She could hear the unspoken _this time_ in my tone and flinched. "Without knowing for certain what spell that sorcerer used on your brother, it might be some time before I can help," I continued. "Why don't you try and rest? I'll do what I can."

She nodded and unwound the scarf from her neck, taking off her shoes and settling uneasily on the couch after making certain her corvine brother was none the worse after his encounter with an invisible wall. She closed her eyes, and I went down the hall to talk with the ghost.

As I had anticipated, Bainbridge was _not_ especially pleased by our presence. He opened his complaint with a demand that I take the girl and her bird-brother and get _out_; I merely shook my head and told him, "I can't do that, ghost. This was the safest place I could find them, and they will not be here long. You were listening." This was not a question.

"Of course I was listening," the ghost snapped irritably. "I don't see what that has to do with any—"

I cut him off. "The High Council will be very interested in her story – or rather, her brother's," I told him. "They would not be pleased that a mortal knows even so much as she does, but the brother..."

Bainbridge's eyes met mine. "You intend to use him to get to that sorcerer," he accused me.

"Not just the sorcerer," was my reply. "All of the sorcerer's apprentices. _Especially_ Thompson."

"Who _is_ this Thompson?" Bainbridge wanted to know. Well, he couldn't have heard, having been confined to his skull for the duration of the search for Dresden and his subsequent trial five years previously.

"Roughly around the same time that Dresden killed his uncle," I informed the ghost, "a young man named Rafael Thompson murdered his father with magic."

"Black magic?" Bainbridge asked.

I hesitated. "We... don't know," I said at last. "The boy fled before Wardens arrived on the scene; while there was definitely magic involved in Gabriel Thompson's demise, it didn't have quite the same feel as black magic."

Bainbridge arched an eyebrow at me. "And the boy has gone unpunished this long? You're slipping up, Morgan."

That touched a nerve, but I controlled my temper. "For starters, that boy was never under my jurisdiction, ghost. He hails from Sacramento, California. Secondly, if Miss Opkirk's story is true, then he has probably been under the protection of that sorcerer of hers. We'll need more information from the brother, which we can't get if he's trapped in the body of a raven."

I watched Bainbridge carefully, hoping that he would take the bait. The ghost was old, far older than I, and was certainly clever enough to realise he was being manipulated no matter how carefully I went about it. At last he nodded. "There are a number of spells that could be used," he said. "The most simple of these is a reversion spell: it should return the boy to his proper form."

I had heard of such a spell, but had never had a need to use it before. "And you know how to work something like that?"

He looked mildly offended. "Of course I do. I would hardly be a proper sorcerer if—"

"Show me."

* * *

Because Bainbridge's access to magic was severely restricted on account of his being dead, and because I'd never before worked a transforming spell intended to be used on a living being, it took the both of us some hours to get everything we needed for the spell set up. I was not entirely comfortable with the thought of using this spell – the magic involved was not black, but it was shading into dark grey – but I could see no other alternative. When we were ready, I fetched Corbin and got him to settle down on the floor so we could turn him back. Miss Opkirk woke while I argued with the stubborn bird-boy, but she remained silent.

Taking a deep breath, I chanted the words of the spell and felt the magic surround the raven...

And nothing happened. "This doesn't make sense," I said. "It should have worked!"

"What was it supposed to do?" Miss Opkirk asked, her eyes full of worried dismay.

"Return him to his original form," I told her.

She shook her head. "No, that can't be right!"

"Why not?" Bainbridge asked.

The girl shrank away from him, but whispered, "Because that's the spell the sorcerer used to turn Corbin into a raven to start with."

"Say that again?" I asked, thinking I couldn't have heard right. Unfortunately, it was clear that I had. This changed everything.

"I've heard of such a thing before," said Bainbridge slowly, "but not quite like this."

I pierced the ghost with a glare. "Explain."

"There was a practise among the... less fortunate wizards of my time for transforming an animal to a human shape for use as a servant," replied Bainbridge. "Such things have since been forbidden, of course." I did not appreciate the ironic tone to his voice. "Dogs were popular for their loyalty, though some would use crows, as they came the closest to human intelligence. A certain witch at the time, Ava of Yorkshire, would experiment with the transformed animals, using magic to make their minds even closer to a human's."

He eyed the bird. "But even she could not give them magic."

"Wait!" cried Miss Opkirk. "Are you saying that Corbin – _my_ brother – isn't human!?"

"That is precisely what I'm saying," Bainbridge told her. "And now I wonder if the same is true of _you_."

She whimpered and cringed away, and I moved between them. "Enough, ghost," I snapped. "Don't take your problems with me out on her. She's been through enough already."

"You heard her, Morgan," Bainbridge snapped. "She calls him her brother. How do you know that she isn't—"

"He's my foster brother," Miss Opkirk said softly, bringing the ghost up short. "I met him four years ago after his mother was murdered."

Yet more information that I should have been told from the start. My temper, already frayed, snapped. "Is there anything _else_ you may have forgotten to mention?" I asked her acidly, taking hold of her shoulders. "Is your mother a werewolf? Family pet a banshee? Or maybe—" I stopped without warning, having made the mistake of looking into her eyes as I berated her. It was the budding tears that made me leave off, but then I continued to look, and gazed into her soul as she stared into mine.

Monica Opkirk was only sixteen, little more than a child, with a deep, abiding faith in the Christian god. She loved Corbin as though he truly was her brother, and clearly had had no idea as to his true form. She was far more frightened than she had let on even to me, and had been so reticent with her information because she _had_ heard of Wardens – from her brother, and from Rafael Thompson. I could see glimpses of memories, memories of the brother she loved and the man she feared warning her that Wardens were not to be trusted, that she might find herself in more trouble than she could realise if we were to find that she, a mere mortal, knew so much about the magical world.

As I freed the both of us from the Soulgaze, I reflected that I did not like that the pair of them had a point. Ancient Mai had a tendency towards ruthlessness and would not take kindly to finding out about what had been going on in Alaska. I also had no illusions with how she would deal with Corbin, as he was not human. Wordlessly, I helped her to sit down. When two people exchange a soul gaze, there unfortunately is no way to tell what the other person will see. Whatever it was that she had seen in my soul had caused her tears to spill over and course silently down her face.

She would not look at me now, and I honestly couldn't blame her for it.

Ignoring Bainbridge, who for once was being silent, I crouched in front of the girl. "Monica," I said softly, calling her by her given name for the first time. "Look at me."

I had no intention of mentioning the girl to Ancient Mai. From everything I had seen in the soul gaze, Monica could _not_ survive on her own with everything she knew. The nameless sorcerer knew her for a weakness, not just for her brother, but surprisingly for Thompson as well.

And that was something else I could not in conscience mention to Ancient Mai. Mai wanted the warlock dead, as he was one who had murdered with magic. He had evaded punishment for five years, and she would think very little of using a sixteen-year-old girl in order to bring the boy to justice. That was something that I, even as a Warden, could not in honesty condone. More than ever now, I needed to revert her brother to a human form.

And somehow keep Ancient Mai from discovering the boy wasn't human at all.

I could feel a headache coming on.

She looked up at me, though she would not meet my eyes, and I couldn't blame her for that, either. "I told you that I would do what I could for your brother. That has not changed." I hesitated, then added, "I'm sorry for losing my temper. I realise that you're scared, but you have to understand, I _want_ to help you. But I can't if you keep things away from me."

She opened her mouth to speak, and I shook my head. "I need to discuss this with Bainbridge some more." A hint of annoyance seeped into my tone as I admitted, "Something like this is beyond my expertise as a Warden."

A harsh caw, and the raven landed on Monica's shoulder to glare at me some more. I ignored him yet again. "This may take some time. Help yourself to the books," I suggested as I headed for the workshop Dresden thought I didn't know about.

* * *

It was late when I dragged myself back to the living area. I could smell the lingering traces of garlic bread and realised that Monica must have eaten. I checked the kitchen to see if she was still in there – she wasn't – and was startled to see that she had left out a bowl of spaghetti and a few pieces of garlic bread for me. It had long since grown cold, but I could hardly fault her for that, as I'd never said how long I would be working with Bainbridge.

Moving into the living area, I could see the girl sleeping on Dresden's couch. "Corbin," I said quietly, hoping the bird-boy had not also gone to sleep.

A rustle, then he flew from a spot in the shadows to land on the chair next to me. "Bainbridge thinks he found a spell that will change you back. Are you ready?"

It was hard to tell in the dark room, but I think he was glaring at me.

"Then get off that chair so you don't break it." The last thing I needed was Dresden whinging at me.

Still silent, he fluttered to the floor as I made a warding circle to protect Monica from the possibility of backlash. I'd already gathered the materials I needed for the spell and set them just inside the circle, then murmured the incantation Bainbridge had made me memorise.

For a moment, nothing happened.

Then, without warning, the bird vanished completely, to be replaced by a naked teenage boy with long dark hair. He swore, took a step back, and fell over; the impact brought Monica awake with a startled cry.

His head swung around to face her. "Monica!" he cried, getting up and moving towards her. His limbs, however, were still accustomed to moving as though he was a bird, and he fell over again with another curse. By the time he straightened himself out, Monica was at his side and hugging him desperately.

Electing to leave the two of them alone for the moment, I slipped into the kitchen to eat what Monica had left me. When I was done, I checked on the living room again; the boy had wrapped a blanket around his waist and watching his sleeping sister, gently stroking her hair. As I walked in, his head snapped around to me. "I suppose I owe you my thanks, Warden," he said grudgingly.

"Don't thank me just yet, boy," I told him. "You're not out of the fire."

"You want me for Thompson." No surprise in his tone, though there was a hint of smug satisfaction to it. "Guarantee me Monica will be safe and I'm all yours."

I couldn't help but smile in anticipation of the hunt. Wary young wizards I could deal with, and Dresden could babysit the girl for the time being. All in all, a better ending to the day than I had expected.

* * *

_Many thanks to Priscellie and TigerKat for being my betas. I do not own the Dresden Files or any of the characters within it; Monica, Corbin, and Rafe are all mine, however._


End file.
